Interracial Doesn't Have to be Reductive

[Britva415]

That's because they're real... I am not alone in my assertions.
We write about them, because it happens.

The way it usually happens in the trope is that the eyes are a proxy for the entirety of the person's exoticness. The eyes are made to stand in for the mystery of foreign-ness, the compulsion to decipher the alien person's inscrutability, the allure and beauty of that "other."

 

[JMJ4Play]

Hope my experience this weekend lives up to my fantasy

 

[pink_silk_glove]

eyes....
They are the windows to our dreams. The portals that transport attraction. Eyes cannot lie...
To gaze into the eyes of one so sweet. To see their souls reflected in their light.
Eyes exude attraction, and when you connect with another human being through merely a glance. It is beautiful.
It doesn't matter their colour, blue, grey, almond.
I love connecting with somebody. Across a room, an office, a street. You catch a glimpse of them, their head tilts a little when they catch you staring. Your eyes connect, a stare, inquisitive. You look away embarrased, as do they. But then, you try again, but your actions are mirrored and again you lock eyes.
An expectation builds... Desire burns, flames lick at the edges.
This is true attraction....
The eyes.... You cannot escape

Cagivagurl

So if a person has eyes, no matter what shape or color, and completely regardless of any other feature and regardless of body type, thin chubby, tall short, stocky, bent and crooked, bald, fuzzy, hairy, tidy, messy, you are attracted enough to them that you would consider sleeping with them? You do realize that this is everyone on earth, right?

What if someone wore sunglasses? : P

 

[enbiji]

...but it does have to be reDICKtive

 

[StillStunned]

Not to you but for many it is. Just like I can say that incest is not the least bit erotic to me, yet for many it is. I'm not going to say that it's not erotic, period, just because I'm not into it personally.

I said "exotic", not "erotic".

Yeah, Europe has never cared about the color of people's skin!

Of course it has, and still does. But the interracial fetish seems to be mostly an American one.

 

[Cagivagurl]

So if a person has eyes, no matter what shape or color, and completely regardless of any other feature and regardless of body type, thin chubby, tall short, stocky, bent and crooked, bald, fuzzy, hairy, tidy, messy, you are attracted enough to them that you would consider sleeping with them? You do realize that this is everyone on earth, right?

What if someone wore sunglasses? : P

If I felt the attraction then yes...
I'm attracted to what's inside, not the outer shell.
Extraneous beauty is so shallow.
I'm attracted to the mind, and I see that through the eyes, and their words.
The words are important, but the eyes tell me whether it's the truth.
People are more than how they look.
Beauty my friend is more than skin deep.

Cagivagurl

 

[Cagivagurl]

...but it does have to be reDICKtive

No dicks required...
Or requested.

Cagivagurl

 

[pink_silk_glove]

I said "exotic", not "erotic".

exotic /ĭg-zŏt′ĭk/
adjective

From another part of the world; foreign: synonym: foreign.
"exotic tropical plants in a greenhouse."
Similar: foreign Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange: synonym: fantastic.
Similar: fantastic

Please tell me how an interracial coupling or attraction is no way exotic?

 

[pink_silk_glove]

If I felt the attraction then yes...
I'm attracted to what's inside, not the outer shell.
Extraneous beauty is so shallow.
I'm attracted to the mind, and I see that through the eyes, and their words.
The words are important, but the eyes tell me whether it's the truth.
People are more than how they look.
Beauty my friend is more than skin deep.

Cagivagurl

Ok then. You are the least superficial person I have ever met and so saintly that I will concede defeat here as a shallow human being and leave you be while I seek inner redemption for my transgressions.

 

[Cagivagurl]

Well I was just joking, so you can chill out.

Then again...the reality is, a vast majority of stories in the Interracial category are hetero (by all means, correct me if I'm wrong).

So yes, it usually does require a dick, princess.

Don't worry.
I'm chilled...
Maybe I'm not the one who should chill...
Humour flows in more than one direction....
I don't think interracial requires dicks...
As a category all it requires are aliens...

Cagivagurl

 

[AchtungNight]

I may write a story about my most frequent male lead reconnecting with his first high school girlfriend, a modern-day reincarnation of a famous Asian princess, one day. If so, I might put the story in Interracial. The kink isn't something I'm going to emphasize, it's just there and they only end up friends with benefits. I guess we'll see when and if I write the fic.

 

[BBlaketbv]

I have one story pretty much ready. It's about a girl from Ghana who goes to France to study abroad.
I've felt the story still lacked something for it to be ready to be published. This thread has given me some inspiration on how to make my story more interesting

 

[TheRedChamber]

Probably a good place to drop a plug for my new story Mark of a True Queen in which I deconstruct some of the cliches of the genre. No wait, not 'deconstruct', that's a bit too fancy-smansy, it does something with them anyway.

I've written about this before - I'm quite open that I have, if not an interracial fetish, then at least an intercultural, international and exoticism fetish. That is to say that, as a Brit, I'd take the All-American Cowgirl or Russian Ballerina over the girl next door (who honestly is a bit chavvy anyway). And that extends further - the point about stereotypes or at least architypes is there are, or should be, way more than one of them per ethnicity - so, while I like reading and writing stories about Asian women, for example, I'm happy for them to be either Ninja or Geisha and anything in between, including, ya know, ordinary everyday people. The submissive orientalist fantasy Asian girl has her appeal, but nothing has pressed my very specific buttons more in recent years than Michael Yeoh as the sadistic God-Emperess of the Star Trek Mirror Universe (well, until the writing became crap...no, crapper)

And as a bisexual married man, I quite like some of the interracial bull porn stories, picturing myself as either bull, cuck or wife as the story progresses, even if it's not exactly subtle and especially as a lot of the gangsta/thug architypes don't really do it for me. As others have said, nearly all the IR stories are filtered through that particularly American view of race which is very...yeah. Growing up in the Fens, my experience with other ethnicities was I knew exactly one (half) black girl, one Indian doctor who my dad played golf with, and the man who ran the Chinese take-away. So it's perhaps not suprising that I developed a fascinatation with the dusky-eyed, caramel skinned, hyper-exotic, Anglo-Indian girls who hung around the mall in cosmopolitan Peterborough. And when I got to university the first black friends I made were Africans on scholarships (and Londoners which was exotic and exciting enough in itself.)

 

[NoTalentHack]

It doesn't have to be reductive, but that's what the readers in the category reward.

I have eight stories where the ethnicity of the characters is directly specified, in a variety of different combinations. Of them, one (New Year, New Experiences) might work in Interracial, because it includes BBC-on-blonde and white-on-Asian-woman scenes, and the "exoticism" of the two non-white characters is a part of the story. However, the payoffs the Interracial crowd seem to look for are subverted: the Black guy with the big dick is super nice and encouraging to the white guy; the Asian woman, while slightly submissive during sex, is also very clearly running the show when it comes to everything else going on; the blonde girl-next-door doesn't become slavishly addicted to BBC. It's over in Group Sex, because it's, well, a group sex story, but in the comments I got both here and elsewhere, I saw more than a few saying, "Nah, she's going to be addicted to BBC now, she's going to go behind his back."

While I'm not one to point at a few comments and say "these people clearly speak for the majority," I can point at other stories that were posted in IR and should have received higher ratings as additional evidence. The Flip Side by oneagainst is a great IR story that explicitly discuses race and its impact in a loving, married couple's BDSM play, for example. Mark of a True Queen by RedChamber is a hilarious bit of fun. Neither got their due. If you look at the New page there, you can see why: the vast majority of the stories are either paint-by-numbers BBC or BWC stories.

The occasional romance does well in there--Spam on Rice by ronde may be the kind of thing you're looking for--but the romances probably would do better in, well, Romance, and they'd be in more "appropriate" company, i.e., with other stories that are more often about the detail of characters and how they interact. That's where I put mine, including the one (Cultural Exchanges) that's explicitly about the two characters' cultural differences and, beneath the surface, their similarities. Neither they nor those differences are fetishized; they're just a part of who they are. In my mind, that's what IR (the category) is all about, whether it should be or not, and that makes it almost anthema to what you're describing.

I plan to dive in there eventually, but it's going to be with a story that's specifically about raceplay and dissecting it. I don't know if that means it'll do well or extremely poorly.

 

[lovecraft68]

I could agree with pretty much everything that you have said, but the readership in general for that category really just want the racial stereotypes.

Same can be said for most categories. The base draw of a kink is what most of them want and don't need it dressed up or any spins on it, let alone bother trying to develop characters.

Black stud gives white slut the fucking she has never had before. Black man portrayed as a step above an animal, woman a drooling cumslut who has lost her mind over BBC.

All this with heavily racist overtones that paint both characters in a bad light.

I'm fine with interracial sex as in two characters of different ethnicities together, but without fetishizing it.

I don't mind IR videos, the contrast in skin is a turn on for me, but if the dialogue devolves into demeaning the woman or the endless "Oh BBC!" every third word, I'll click it off.

May just be me, but its hard for me to take the category at surface value and not see deeper. I won't even go in to how awful its portrayed in the LW category.

 

[Yarglenurp]

Well, if nothing else, this thread got me a few different stories to read.

I'm new here, so maybe there's something I don't get... but why do we care about ratings if we're writing for our own pleasure?

 

[NoTalentHack]

Well, if nothing else, this thread got me a few different stories to read.

I'm new here, so maybe there's something I don't get... but why do we care about ratings if we're writing for our own pleasure?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: write for yourself, publish for your readers. It's not a question of whether you should write what you want, but if you're putting it out here for others to see, ideally you want it to reach a receptive audience. Lacking any other metric, ratings, favorites, comments, and views are your only way of knowing if the story is reaching other people that like it. I wouldn't put an incest story in Loving Wives (unless there was an angle there), and I wouldn't put a BTB in Incest; in the same way, I wouldn't put a nuanced, adult, romantic take on an interracial relationship in IR if it would be better received/seen more in romance or EC.

 

[CyranoJ]

The running theme is "differences."

Not really. People with different backgrounds fucking isn't "interracial" if nobody involved actually gives a fuck about race or harbors deep erotic stereotypes on the subject. Real-life "interracial" romantic relationships are typically most durable where this taboo is absent, b/c it gets obvious and tiresome really quickly when your partner is fetishizing you but doesn't actually respect you.

The running theme is taboo. A thing is noticeably interracial where at least one of the characters involved has that worm of racialism somewhere in their lower brains, has a taboo about fucking people of another "race" and gets off on breaking that taboo (or the audience gets off on seeing them cross that barrier). This governs a lot of what's common to the genre. The two-dimensional stereotypes are so commonplace because they're precisely the turn-on for many readers. It's possible to write IR without them (I usually try to avoid going there) and even to have characters who consciously play on and into this taboo to get laid; that's a very real thing, as just about any Black male who's ever had a white woman walk up to him and ask "is it true what they say about Black guys" can attest. But plenty of IR is just "hot White woman plus stereotypical bestialized Black dude(s)" simply because that's pretty much the most commonplace and powerful racialized sex taboo our culture has to offer, just ahead of "White guy and fetishized submissive Asian chick."

 

[CyranoJ]

I'm so glad I grew up in Europe. If you can cross a river and find yourself in a different country, with a different language and a different time zone, and two hours' drive will put you in an entirely different culture, there's nothing exotic about someone with a different skin colour.

I'm sorry, but: miss me with this bullshit. Europe has historically been and still is plentifully supplied with racists.

 

[Comshaw]

Not really. People with different backgrounds fucking isn't "interracial" if nobody involved actually gives a fuck about race or harbors deep erotic stereotypes on the subject. Real-life "interracial" romantic relationships are typically most durable where this taboo is absent, b/c it gets obvious and tiresome really quickly when your partner is fetishizing you but doesn't actually respect you.

The running theme is taboo. A thing is noticeably interracial where at least one of the characters involved has that worm of racialism somewhere in their lower brains, has a taboo about fucking people of another "race" and gets off on breaking that taboo (or the audience gets off on seeing them cross that barrier). This governs a lot of what's common to the genre. The two-dimensional stereotypes are so commonplace because they're precisely the turn-on for many readers. It's possible to write IR without them (I usually try to avoid going there) and even to have characters who consciously play on and into this taboo to get laid; that's a very real thing, as just about any Black male who's ever had a white woman walk up to him and ask "is it true what they say about Black guys" can attest. But plenty of IR is just "hot White woman plus stereotypical bestialized Black dude(s)" simply because that's pretty much the most commonplace and powerful racialized sex taboo our culture has to offer, just ahead of "White guy and fetishized submissive Asian chick."

This:
"The running theme is taboo. A thing is noticeably interracial where at least one of the characters involved has that worm of racialism somewhere in their lower brains, has a taboo about fucking people of another "race" and gets off on breaking that taboo (or the audience gets off on seeing them cross that barrier)."

In the pre-civil war South on some of the plantations the term "poontang" was used to describe black slave pussy. It was used to differentiate between sex with a black slave and a free white woman. The men who used it wanted to separate the two, make it different one from the other, because in their mind slaves were "less than" and couldn't be equal to whites even in sex. With some that mindset has traveled down the years and now it's a fetish, a thing they want but consider verboten.

I can't understand that particular mindset. I never have and never will. I did write one story with a mix of black and white characters, but it was about things that had little to do with skin color: inner demons, bad people, good people, family and finding one. That's what I was trying for when I wrote it and from the reactions it came across that way to those who have read it.

When I published it I never even thought about putting it in Interracial. I submitted it for the Erotic Couplings category but because of an incestuous relationship with two of the characters it was posted in the Incest/Taboo category.

I will say that one concept of black/white couplings is erotic to me. The vision of smooth mahogany-colored skin against cream-colored skin does stir something in me. The mental aesthetics of the juxtaposition of those two, tangled together in a passionate embrace is pleasing to me. Of course any time I think of naked limbs tangled together, two people in a passionate embrace it pleases me. Yeah a randy old bastard I am.

Anyway, this is the story I'm talking about:

HomeComing

Comshaw

 

[Kumquatqueen]

I'm sorry, but: miss me with this bullshit. Europe has historically been and still is plentifully supplied with racists.

Not disagreeing with you at all, sadly. But the racism is different in many ways, much more derived from general xenophobia, classism and distaste for poverty, and fear of religion. There's not the same recent history of legal racist structures as in the USA.

Until the 1950s, when my parents were teens, the non-white population in the UK was less than 0.1%. Estimates of 'ethnic minorities' then were up to 2.9%, mostly Irish (I'm not getting into the history of Irish people in the UK!) Then there were waves of mass migration, and in areas where people thought they were being undercut for jobs etc, you got tension. Still do. But we've transitioned to a society where only 83% or so Brits are white, without that much grief compared to many parts of the world, despite warnings of 'rivers of blood', the Brixton riots, and such. Most of the local kids near me in London have at least one black grandparent. Where you don't have mixing, it's down to religion (anti-Muslim feeling is very common).

In other European countries, you had approximately nil non-white people until the 80s or 90s - eastern Europe in particular. Nations getting to grips with capitalism, being the poor neighbours in Europe, and influxes of refugees and generally poor immigrants. It's not an excuse for racism - and just look at relations with the Roma across Europe for a long history of vicious racism - but it's a very different context to America where there's been loads of black people around for hundreds of years, but even since the end of slavery, with legal structures enforcing segregration.

 

[Demiurging]

Fun fact, since I so rarely get a chance to bring it up, the cast of Friends was ethnically diverse for its time. There were only three white people in the main group, then two jewish and one italian. I very much doubt an Irish/Scottish interracial story would do very well if it were put into that category, though.

 

[Comshaw]

Fun fact, since I so rarely get a chance to bring it up, the cast of Friends was ethnically diverse for its time. There were only three white people in the main group, then two jewish and one italian. I very much doubt an Irish/Scottish interracial story would do very well if it were put into that category, though.

"I am black on the right side...Loki is white on the right side... "

Hmmmmmmm


Comshaw

 

[pink_silk_glove]

the contrast in skin is a turn on for me

Yes, I often find that contrast very beautiful as well, but like Cagiva just spelled it out so clearly, finding beauty in melatonin levels makes us bad people because it perpetuates racial stereotypes, promotes racism, and proves just what truly shallow human beings we are. So if I'm kinda hot for Gackt (Asian pop star) but have zero interest in sleeping with L'il Wayne, apparently that makes me shallow and racist, and likewise LC if you're into your redhead wife but not hot for Susan Boyle you're a judgmental body shamer. How dare we have preferences in personal appearance. Ugly people have a right to our love and affection, dammit! Won't you join me in praying for our redemption.

 

[CyranoJ]

Fun fact, since I so rarely get a chance to bring it up, the cast of Friends was ethnically diverse for its time. There were only three white people in the main group, then two jewish and one italian. I very much doubt an Irish/Scottish interracial story would do very well if it were put into that category, though.

It's always fascinating to run into people who still seriously consider Jews and Italians "non-white" and who don't realize how much this betrays about their clinging to very old patterns of racism. This is honestly a bit like running into a preserved Know-Nothing from the 1840s who thinks "Micks" are exotic.

(And no, having a few different flavors of White people on a show was not "ethnically diverse for its time." Diversity in casting has come a long way since the turn of the century, but the Nineties were nowhere near that backward. There was nobody then, as there should be nobody now, pretending the cast of Friends was "diverse.")

but it's a very different context to America where there's been loads of black people around for hundreds of years, but even since the end of slavery, with legal structures enforcing segregration.

Yes, the context is different, obviously. What's striking is that it actually seems to be worsening in the EU, which has quite strong anti-discrimination laws on the books. It's just hard for societies that built their prosperity on colonialism/imperialism to turn the other direction on a dime; that's the biggest lesson that America and Europe have in common.